Department of DUH!

I sit on my bed as I write, with my two very wild and weary boys. I remember when I first got my sonograms to determine their sex. Were they boys or girls?? The question was asked by every person I met, my ever extending belly provoking conversations from strangers and friends alike.

Boy? Or Girl?

ABCnews.com has an article up focusing on the ethical dilemma of making the determination of gender when the determination itself is unclear.

…As in kids who are intersex. Eleven years ago, when I was pregnant (so naive and hopeful about life and parenting!) with my first, gender clarity didn't seem to be in question. His very present maleness floating about in my maternal hot-tub. It was quite obvious. He was a boy.

(As was my second, though he was a touch more camera shy.)

It was an easy thing, I thought, to determine their gender. Just a sonogram, and there you go. Like I said, I was naive. As they've grown, they've aligned themselves with their assigned sex. They seem happy as male children… at ease with "typical masculinity" and the trappings thereof even though, like a modern liberal parent, I've offered them toys along the gender spectrum, neutral colors at my showers, books for both pinks and blues. Their "boyness" hasn't really been in question, at least so far as I can tell. If it is in question, that's for them to tell me.

Waiting for that answer though, isn't something that a lot of people are comfortable with – not parents, nor doctors, nor caregivers, nor teachers. This is why parents, who have spent most of the nine months of pregnancy answering the Ultimate Question About Gender, are likely susceptible to moving quickly on surgery to determine a gender for children born intersex.

They want to be able to answer the question, the one question everyone asks, in the binary. So surgery has been the first line of defense against the confusion of intersex diagnoses.

But that's actually not turning out to be the best decision. By leaping into orientation surgery too soon, mistakes might be made made. Lives might be, quite literally, ruined. Sexuality and sexual response can be diminished. Suicides in later life can occur. The rights of those small children should be protected so that they get to decide who they are when they are ready.

To which I now say, "Duh."

I would like to think I'd have said, "Hell, no, don't operate on my child" even then, in 2000, when my first was born. That I'd want to wait to see who he or she or zie was, prior to placing my own opinions or desires on the child in the form of surgery.

Hopefully, I'm educated enough now to know that even right this second, at the ages of 7 and 11, my children still might have feelings inside themselves that don't match the external, and that my job is to listen and watch and help them as they develop and grow, not make them fit into a binary that they had no choice in being born into.

There is no point in rushing into surgery, in pressuring parents to make a quick decision on the sex of their child. Those things cannot easily be reversed if the wrong choice is made. And the bigger question is, why does the answer matter? Why does the pink or the blue have to be the only choice? What can't people deal? Why is that the main question we are asked when we are pregnant? Because that question lays out a series of boxes the child will then fill throughout his/her/hir life?

(Did I mention how naive I am at times? I get it. I do. But I still think no one gets to choose the sex of another person but that person themselves. And if that means waiting until 5, or 7 or 12, so be it. Everyone should learn to stretch a little.)

I had a hard time figuring out how to blog this post. I myself am guilty of gender essentialism, of asking if the child is "this or that." I thought, I'm the wrong person to provide commentary on the subject. Then again, my children lie here, on the bed, as I type, a tangle of long limbs and creative ideas, and dirty faces and minds filled with possibility. I don't want to fit them into boxes until they are ready to choose those boxes for themselves. And even then, I want them to keep the lid loose, just in case.